'Useful Idiots'

August 1, 1985

U.S. REP. Bill McCullom should be commended for his My Word column, in which he defended the contras in Nicaragua on the issue of terrorism. One is ever amazed at how the communists have been so successful over the years in placing the blame for terrorism on the victims.

The Sandinista government is admittedly a Marxist-Leninist regime, and long before 1917 Lenin argued the role for terrorism. He was forced to use terror after he and his colleagues overthrew the democratic provisional government because in the only free election ever held in Russia 75 percent of the people voted against the Bolsheviks.

During the past 60 years or so Western intellectuals have acted as apologists for every foul deed committed by the communists: the killing of 22 million Russian peasants, the great purges of the 1930s, the Katyn massacre and more recently Afghanistan and Nicaragua.

Lenin had a low opinion of Western intellectuals, referring to them contemptuously as ''useful idots,'' and he predicted that the communists would be able to bamboozle them almost indefinitely. Alas, this has been true because as Saul Bellow wrote, ''A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.''